Security or insecurity? Representations of the UK border in public and policy discourses

Abstract

This article analyses representations of the UK border (in relation to migration) in UK public and policy discourses. It uses methods from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to compare the two discursive domains. A 26 million-word corpus of policy documentation and British newspaper articles published between 2007 and 2014 is examined using the analysis tool Sketch Engine and applying qualitative concordance analysis. The analysis reveals a key difference between the two domains: while the UK border is represented as a security concept in the policy corpus, the corpus of the public newspaper domain frequently and saliently represents the UK border as a concept dominated by insecurity. The article argues that the discursive label of European Union has played a role in contributing to this difference.

Keywords:

• Border
• security
• migration
• UK
• EU
• corpus analysis
• discourse analysis

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Corrigendum

Notes

1. For more details about the project and additional publications, please go to: https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/project/border-security-discourses-and-practices-in-the-uk/

2. Measured by how strongly collocates ‘hang together’; the calculation is computed by the logdice statistic (for details, Curran 2004).